Amy Qualls is a quilter and Drupalist based in Portland, Oregon.

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books

I've asked myself this question a lot over the past few years, and the only answer I've come up with is that some people feel strange buying a book that's already been read by someone else. Is there such a thing as literary virginity? Most people seem to think so.Think about it:

I'm going back into my book world. Let me tell you, a woman with James Joyce on the brain and Marvin Gaye singing antiwar songs in her ears is a woman buried to her eyebrows in lyricism.

I can't remember, exactly, when I started on Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I know that I got halfway through it and put it down in favor of reading The Lord of the Rings.

Portrait has held the topmost spot on the bookshelf closest to the window, spine facing out, toward the living room. When I water my plants, my trek to refill my water jug takes me through the reading room to the back door of the kitchen. Every day I would pass the bookshelf, and with some degree of guilt I would see the slim paperback, waiting for me to come back to it.

There is comfort to be had here. The softness of the light, the sound of falling drops splashing onto shingle, the sensation of dry skin relaxing in the presence of atmospheric moisture. Prismatic globes of water trapped between the strands of a finely-meshed storm screen. The rain howling down, slanted by wind until it rained at a sharp angle.

CDNow's article about the Juno awards had a snippet in it that made me laugh. It rattled off a string of artists up for awards, but then mentioned "national heroes Tragically Hip…" which left me a bit dumbfounded.

Y'know, Brad's been trying to tell me this for years, but I think it took a two-word sobriquet on a music site to really understand the difference between there and here.

While he was here, Brad gave me three books to read. Two I plowed through quickly—Clifford Simak's Way Station and Salinger's Catcher In The Rye. The third, George R. R. Martin's A Game Of Thrones, is the one that's currently cracking me up.